Chris Robinson's Tsunamiball Continues... Working On A Viable Design To Survive The Big One

A couple years ago Chris Robinson was a former Facebook and PayPal art director with no boat-building (nor sailing) experience. Then the Tsunami hit Japan (a place where he’d lived and met his wife). He happened to be working in a startup incubator at the time with some “very smart people”, including an astronaut, and everyone was sketching ideas for tsunami-proof shelters.

Robinson liked his design (inspired by oil-derrick escape pods and the hanging tree house spheres from Canadian artist Tom Chudleigh) so much, he began to build it behind his house. Two years later, his backyard is dominated by his 22-foot-long, 10-foot-wide and 8.5-foot-high plywood and epoxy tsunami-proof pod (AKA Tsunamiball).

"I am not a prepper. I just see this as a serious problem, and I just want to think it through. The best way I know to think it through is to build it."

"The idea of a composting toilet in an airtight environment is uhh... tough. We might pee in a bucket."

"I only design enough to know what I'm doing for the next four or five weeks."

" I built it in a way that I could assemble the pieces in my shop, and then bring them outside and assemble them together." "I wasn't really sure how big it would be until I started putting it together."